Involuntary. Loss(y). Privacy.

Will we look at this era in history as “The End of Print”? The loss of books printed on paper, handwritten letters, official documents being stored as archival records; Tangible proof. How is yesterday’s tactile history being translated into tomorrow’s impalpable future? Are printed and hand-marked objects really timeless?

My interest with digital information is the look at technology as our primary source for knowledge, the new “library”. It seems that just by virtue of existing in an online search, the results are usually accepted as ‘truth’. While digital archives are growing exponentially, they expose only fragments of our individual identities. We are losing information literally as a low-resolution image is compressed to be viral. In this way, public image databases and the personal visual profiles they generate challenge ideas about who we truly are.

I use surveillance videos and public monitoring systems as tools for source material. For this work, I’ve selected, from among other things, public incarceration photos from the various correctional facilities. These faces, familiar through memory or relationship, are altered to call into question ideas about the known and the unknown. My aim is to use this latest body of work to trouble the waters and blur the lines between the private and the public, the profile and the individual.

–Stephen Flemister www.stephenflemister.com

The desire to do this Englewood Boys series grew out of my experiences dealing with my son’s incarceration and association with the juvenile detention system as a teenager. In that time, his mother and I made many visits to him that made us feel as if we’re locked in as well. Each trip would make us more and more angry that our son had put himself and us in that situation.

While my son is no longer incarcerated, it was a haunting experience that left a lasting impression. After a while, I felt that the best way for me to deal with these demons was to make art! Being in the studio allowed me to act as my own therapist in my quest for emotional healing.

I collected public data images from the Internet of boys and men who’d committed crimes and who looked like my son. I wasn’t interested in their names or alleged crimes, only whether or not their look engaged me. I wanted to study their psychology solely through portraiture. I selected watercolor as the medium to explore the facial terrain of the perpetrators and later expanded my portrayals to include wooden pedestal boxes. It was important to translate the experience of what it’s like to become a disjointed profile, a repetitive anonymous image seemingly lost and in a world separate from the choices and steps that led to that circumstance.

–Julian Williams www.julianwilliamsnow.com